It's time to kickoff another HP Discover with some blockbuster storage news. I have been looking forward to the news we have today for a while! I think storage industry watchers come to expect innovation from the storage startups - expectations for legacy vendors like HP are low. WIth the news I have to share, I'm glad to show you that innovation is alive and well in HP Storage! So let me jump right into it.

HP 3PAR StoreServ All-Flash gets dedupe

What if you can get all-flash at the same cost (or less) than 15K (that's rotation speed) SAS hard drives? HP is the first to get there! We have lots of innovations that are helping us drive the cost of useable flash capacity down but the big ones is Thin Deduplication and new 1.9TB cMLC flash drives. What will set apart what we have is delivering high performance with resiliency and scale. And since I mentioned resiliency, we've also announced our Get 6-Nines Guarantee - we're so confident about the tier-1 features with HP 3PAR that we have a new program and I'll have more on that in the coming days.

Frankly, I think we had a great story before this announcement but with the enhancements, we're leaving the flash startups in the dust.

HP StoreOnce Federated Catalyst

HP StoreOnce Backup System has a virtual storage appliance (VSA), single node, and multi-node systems in the portfolio. What is cool and unique is that it uses a single deduplication engine across all of these systems that we call Federated Deduplication. Our approach allows you to deduplication once and replicate anywhere. This greatly simplifies backup.

What we've announced today is Federated Catalyst. It enables you to manage a single federated pool of backup capacity our on HP StoreOnce 6500. It enables an autonomically load balanced pool of backup capacity that drastrically simplies the approach EMC has with silos of with Data Domain and Avamar that creates complexity.

I have a ChalkTalk that summarizes the news. It's a good summary of what we announced.

There is a lot to talk about this week so later today I'll go a bit deeper on the 3PAR news so check back for that. If you haven't signed up for our webcast on June 10 from Las Vegas, you still have time. It will be a group of customers in a panel discussion. You can register by clicking hereor on the image.

Hey Peter! Wish you were here. It's been a GREAT HP Discover! The pricing is after dedup - that is the measure everyone is comparing. However it's worth noting that because of innovations we've made working with our flash vendors and the decline in prices, there has been a significant drop in the last year. $/GB of flash last year at this time was about $26 and now the price is under $8.

One other note, the $2/GB price of useable capacity is based on 4:1 deduplication. I think we are using the most conservative number and some customers will see sub $1/GB for higher deduplication. We think we'll be able to see 10:1 in some environments.

Hi Eva - I'm guessing you haven't seen the other blog posts that give a bit more detail on the 3PAR announcement so let me "count the way" why I think we've run past Pure with the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 All Flash Array:

Pricing: we aren't just a little less than what Pure has announced as their pricing but I think nearly 2X less. We have the $/GB (useable) at under $2/GB. There are several things contributing to this that are unique to HP but this biggest is Adaptive Sparing. This allows HP to give customers about 20% more capacity with SSDs than others - because of the 3PAR architecture and integration we have with SSD vendors.

Polymorphic Simplicity: This is a drum we've been beating for some time now. HP 3PAR is a single architecture with a common OS, common data services, and common management for mid-range, tier-1 and all flash. Pure is a flash only silo that creates complexity and another platform to manage.

Tier-1: 3PAR has a complete set of data services that make HP 3PAR a very compelling Tier-1 array. Pure - not so much. They have a long way to go to offer things like 3-site replication, multi-node (more than 2) systems, Peer Persistence (for VMware stretched clusters and more), and sychronous remote replication. And we back up our HA capabilities with a new Get 6-Nines Guarantee.

There's more I could discuss but let me summarize it this way: Pure Storage requires 2x more $/GB and 6x the systems to deliver all-flash performance with only limited Tier-1 resiliency compared to HP 3PAR StoreServ.